Field of the Disclosure
The present disclosure relates to cooperative deployment of mobile robots, and specifically relates to a method for cooperatively deploying mobile robotic sensors among a group of fixed sensors, and a cooperative system of robotics.
Description of Related Art
Robots are used for many military and civilian applications. Many such applications, such as search-and-rescue operations or area monitoring during an environmental disaster, cannot be effectively carried out by a single robot, but rather are carried out by a many robots linked cooperatively in a robotic network.
To build a robotic network, one needs a mechanism to organize the available robots. Further, in many scenarios the mechanism must be capable of functioning without human intervention or assistance. Some works have proposed methods for the distribution of robots, but these have tended to suffer from limitations such as evenly spreading the robots regardless of demand, requiring an a priori known distribution of demand over an area, or requiring centralized coordination of the robots.